Gone are the days of just word-of-mouth or newspaper advertisements. Today, for most brands their customers are on social media and are ready to interact with the brand there.

The most conservative business houses want to make their own facebook page. We are surprised to see fully operational websites of sanskrit publishers like Chaukhamba Orientalia and Dehati Pustak Bhandar. These are the companies which still operate from the narrow alleys of Varanasi and Delhi and their offices are still inside medieval buildings with just electricity as a modern gadget.

Interacting with your customers on social media is a crucial aspect of your marketing plan. But how does one go about it? Entrepreneur India spoke to start-up founders and experts about how they believe one should interact with customers on social media.

Why is Social Media Important?

In today’s day and age, conversations happen on social media. Umeed Kothavala, CEO and Co-Founder, Extentia, believes that social media has become a customer service center for businesses, large and small. Social interactions provide benefits such as increased exposure, lead generation, reduction of marketing expenses, improve online search ranking and develop loyal fans. “Understanding the platforms used by your audience is fundamental towards growing the business,” he said.

Given the large numbers of people today using social media for various purposes, Shenaz Bapooji, CMO, Shopmatic believes that social media marketing is unavoidable. “You have to actively engage with your customers on social media or you lose the opportunity to gain more users,” she said.

Social media ROI comes down to having a strong understanding of what your goals are, what you plan to do, and what you’re looking to get out of it.

With more than 50 million businesses owning a Facebook Business Page and 94 percent of B2B organizations relying on LinkedIn for content marketing and distribution, it is clear that social media is continuing to grow.

With so many new businesses breaking into Social Media, it is no wonder they can often times feel overwhelmed and find it hard to determine the impact it is having for their business.

Social media ROI comes down to having a strong understanding of what your goals are, what you plan to do, and what you’re looking to get out of it.

Let’s review some key steps to building a social media strategy that results in definite ROI.

Social Media ROI Definition
ROI is getting a return. Obvious, right?

But when it comes down to how to calculate social media ROI, it isn’t just the result of revenue minus expenses.

ROI is value received in return of an investment.

The value you receive as a return on your social media marketing investment might include increased:

Customer lifetime value: Transactions — sales

Customer referral value: Referrals — leads, traffic

Customer influence value: Word of mouth — branding, reach

Customer knowledge value: Information — market research

You might be interested to know that engagement is the social media metric most important to respondents of Search Engine Journal’s 2017 state of digital survey. – Read more

It has taken a long while for Social Media to evolve as a marketing medium for businesses.

Though the B2B space has been slower to grow on this channel, many brands have started to make the most of it. Today, about 85% of B2B marketers use Social Media in one way or another, and they see results.

You may be one of that 85 %, however, are you leveraging social media to the extent you should? Also, are you doing it in the right manner? Social Media, today is a double-edged sword that can be highly rewarding as well as dangerous at the same time. More than 70% of your customers would expect a response from you within the hour, and if you do not, you will probably get an adverse reaction. Social media can beget real-time results but can be quite a minefield, tread carefully.

The way to tread carefully can get tedious, however, integrating your social media assets into a CRM [Customer Relationship Management] system can make it easier. This will not only help you avoid the pitfalls but also enable your business to address customer queries and service issues much faster. And finally, it will help you generate and nurture leads efficiently.

This is where Social CRM steps in. Keeping in mind the required best practices, let us see why you should use it and what benefits can it bring you.

The visibility boost: Search engine optimization has always driven organic marketing and the keywords or key phrases have already debuted in social media. With social media entwined with search engines, it is to your advantage if can integrate those keywords or key phrases into your social media posts, videos or whatever kind of content you post. This is very important since customers need to find your business and the first place they would look at is the search engines.

Influencer marketing: According to numerous studies, it has been found that over 90% of customers trust reviews and recommendations from other people before they make a buying decision. This is where the importance of influencer marketing comes to the fore. An influencer is someone who is an expert in your niche and has a great many followers on FaceBook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Through Social CRM you can keep a tab of influencer activity, and if you choose to engage with them, you can do it with ease. Being a part of their conversations is a very good idea and getting them to speak about your brand is even better. You will need to build a relationship with them slowly before you can engage them to your advantage.

Internal Resources: The best way to get ahead with social media brand building and lead generation are to engage with your customers and offer them world-class service. So much so that they should turn into your brand advocates and speak about you on social media. Another method to gain traction on social media is to engage your employees and create social media accounts for them. They can use those to build your brand. OF course, having a social media manager onboard will go a long way in achieving these objectives using the Social CRM.

Technology to the rescue: Using a Social CRM brings its advantages in terms of making it easier to respond on multiple social media platforms with immediacy. Honestly, all social media interfaces are built for individuals and not for businesses, therefore taking care of many accounts together can be slow and painful, not to mention the limitations that these social platforms come with. To mention, CRM’s are built on the foundation of analytical functions, and they can generate some insightful reports in no time which makes figuring out an effective strategy becomes much easier.

Content is king: This has been reiterated time and again and content on social media needs to be spot on. Social media is a really fast draw, and one has to be on their toes to leverage the full potential. If you see an opportunity and don’t act on it, be sure that your competition has already swung it his way in no time. There is a lot going on – videos, events, freebies, offers, discounts, live feeds and many others wherein taking care of everything in real time can become challenging. A Social CRM can make your proactive on many such goings-on, and you can leverage your leads before they get hijacked.

The above are only some of the benefits that opting for a Social CRM can bring to your table. There are many others which you will realize with use. The world has gone social, and so did you. To stand up in the crowd, it is essential that you opt for a Social CRM. – Read More

Digital takes the cake in the modern marketing world and social media is an important slice. But, they’re not entirely the same thing.

Digital marketing is a cool Generation X who knows the ropes of the internet and how to market your company in classic world wide web fashion. Social media is a more casual millennial, the product of the Gen Xer’s, who bucks against anything traditional and stays connected to the world 24-7.

You need both to spread your message effectively.

Let’s see how understanding ways the two intersect, and stand apart, benefit your business.

By the Book
Digital marketing is any brand messaging or advertising you do on the internet. It includes creating or managing:

With more than 2.19 billion monthly active users, Facebook provides marketing agencies the potential to put brands’ products and services directly in front of a huge, active, and engaged user base—which is precisely why 92 percent of marketers say they use Facebook ads to market their products.

But while Facebook can generate massive revenue for your clients’ business (more on that later), ads require strategy and attention to actually perform, especially since Facebook has made some major changes to its newsfeed this year.

It’s easy enough to put ads in front of people, but getting people to purchase from a client’s website is a whole other story, which is why so many Facebook ads fail to convert clicks into sales.

Brand awareness is great and all, but if you’re not serving your clients’ ads to the right people in the right way, you run the risk of pouring money down the drain on ads that don’t convert. – Read more

Almost everyone has come around to recognizing social media’s importance for marketing and advertising.

After all, social media marketing can help entrepreneurs spread the word about their venture and recruit new customers, which some have described as the hardest part of starting a new business.

And everyone from the biggest brands in the world to startups less than a decade old have seen success by leveraging their social media accounts. For instance, Peel, a cellphone case company, has leaned into social media to highlight its products and frequently utilizes Facebook video to tell its story. Thanks to its social media campaigns, the company has achieved three times higher ROI and a significant spike in revenue. So, the potential is clearly there, but when it comes to reaching a specific audience via social media, there are still plenty of challenges.

Most companies take a broad approach to audience targeting on social media, which can be a good way to start. But truly targeting your desired audience requires a highly granular approach that will vary depending on which platform you use, the amount of attention you can devote to it, your messaging, and your budget. In addition, to reach the members of your audience, you first need to know them. To help you on your path to social media marketing stardom, I reached out to industry experts and entrepreneurs to discover their favorite tricks of the trade. – Read more

Unless you’ve been hiding out in the dark ages, you know social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. Everything from the degree of personal information we share to the way we communicate with others has completely evolved.

Whether this shift has been for better or for worse, is your personal judgment. However, no one can deny the significant impact it’s had on how we live and function on a daily basis.

The impact of social media is no different in the business world. Companies who strive to be innovative trailblazers in their respective industries must leverage social to set themselves apart. Social media isn’t something that can be mastered overnight, nor something that you can mindlessly manage.

When it comes to a successful social strategy that delivers an ROI, you must keep a close eye on rising trends that elevate your marketing efforts to a new level. – Read More

Your goal is to deliver high-quality, relevant content that will engage your audience, establish brand trust, and drive business—but how can you tailor your social content to break through all of the noise, provide value to your audience, and ultimately impact your bottom line?

This 30-Day Social Marketing Plan is designed to help you re-invent your social marketing strategy so that what you share aligns with the interests of your audiences and contributes to overall business value. – Read

If you’ve watched the news, checked your Twitter stream or read your newsfeed in the past few months, you’ve surely seen multiple mentions of the many cases of sexual harassment that have spurred the hashtag movements #MeToo and #TimesUp.

While this article isn’t specifically about sexual assault and harassment, this is a great and recent example of how important monitoring conversations online is for any business.

These two hashtags have created a social media storm that is unprecedented, and they speak to the power of social as a veritable communications channel that brands absolutely must embrace.

A new era

With all the technology that enables us to monitor media mentions and trending topics comes the need for brand managers (and journalists) to adapt their way of proactively interacting with the world around them. – Read